Trump’s epic gamble on Epic Fury

“Operation Iraqi Freedom” lasted nearly nine years, cost 4,400 American lives along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and sparked an insurgency that led to the rise of the brutal ISIS terrorist group.

“Haven’t we learned something from 25 years of war in the Middle East? Have we learned nothing?” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) railed on Fox News during Day 3 of the Iran war.

President Donald Trump, who campaigned on a pledge to keep America out of endless wars, has clearly learned one lesson from Iraq — the way to avoid forever wars is to have a clear exit strategy, one that could be summed up as “just leave.”

To be able to stop fighting on his timeline, Trump has assiduously avoided committing ground forces to any extended deployments, even as he is careful not to rule it out.

“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,” Trump told the New York Post. “I say, ‘Probably don’t need them.’”

Trump doesn’t see Iran as a potential quagmire because once the mighty U.S. military blows up every last missile launcher, destroys every last warplane, and sinks every last ship in the Iranian navy, Trump plans to stop, and — in one of his go-to phrases — “see what happens.”

The first week of the war, from a purely military perspective, has been spectacularly successful with U.S. and Israeli planes striking thousands of targets with impunity, methodically destroying every last vestige of Iran’s weakened military.

“It is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be,” War Secretary Pete Hegseth said in one of his rare Pentagon briefings.  

Trump’s war against Iran is a war of choice, which may be illegal under international law, but is not a concern for the president, who told the New York Times in January he doesn’t need international law. And that when it comes to keeping America safe, the only check on his power is his “own morality.”

Trump and his Cabinet members have given various justifications for going to war without any authorization from Congress — Iran was only a week away from enriching uranium to bomb-grade, its military was locked and loaded to attack U.S. forces in the region, its missile program was developing long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles that would be able to strike the United States, and/or the Iranian people deserved a chance to rise up, and effect regime change.

In a remarkably candid exchange with reporters in the Oval Office, Trump revealed that while he felt no need to consult Congress, he did consult his own gut.

And his gut told him that Iranian negotiators were playing games and that the time to act was now.

“We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first,” Trump said. “I felt strongly about that.”

“I didn’t want that to happen,” Trump said, insisting he was not dragged into war by the threat that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was about to attack Iran, with or without the U.S. “If anything, I might’ve forced Israel’s hand.”

“I think the president was looking for the long haul,” Vice President JD Vance said in an appearance on Fox News. “He didn’t want to just keep the country safe from an Iranian nuclear weapon for the first three, four years of his second term. He wanted to make sure that Iran could never have a nuclear weapon.”

After offering a few explanations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio settled on Trump’s concern that over time, Iran could build a shield of conventional weapons that would make it much harder in the future to take out its nuclear capabilities.

“Iran is run by lunatics, religious fanatic lunatics. They have an ambition to have nuclear weapons,” Rubio told reporters after briefing lawmakers on Capitol Hill. 

“They intend to develop those nuclear weapons behind a program of missiles and drones and terrorism that the world will not be able to touch them for fear of those things. And this is the weakest they’ve ever been. Now was the time to go after them.”

In other words, Trump’s “casus belli” was “carpe diem.”

Trump saw Iran — not so much as an imminent threat — but as a ticking time bomb, one he only had a short window to defuse.

Trump probably wasn’t thinking of it, but there was a moment in not-so-distant history when a U.S. president chose inaction, and the result was that a rogue regime went nuclear and now threatens America with its nuclear and missile arsenal.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton was presented with a military option to destroy North Korea’s nascent nuclear program.  

The Pentagon, though, warned the cost would be high, as it would likely spark all-out war on the Korean peninsula and result in an estimated 2 million casualties. 

Clinton blinked, a diplomatic deal was reached, and over the next two decades, North Korea secretly worked to achieve its goal of becoming a nuclear power. 

Trump’s attack on Iran has sparked a much smaller response, and the major combat operations will likely end in a month or so. 

Iran’s military will be vanquished, the country’s infrastructure will be in shambles, and nobody knows who will be in charge.

The successful, albeit very limited, intervention in Venezuela, which gave Trump the confidence to order his “greatest military in the world” to war with Iran, provides a template for how Trump sees things working out.

Exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah, is the Maria Corina Machado in this scenario — though for Iran, not Venezuela. Nice guy, but without support from what’s left of the regime. 

“Some people like him,” Trump told reporters, but quickly added, “It would seem to me that somebody from within might, maybe, be more appropriate.”

What Trump had in mind was an “Iranian Delcy Rodriguez,” the Venezuelan vice president who’s now cooperating with the U.S. in return for being allowed to stay in power.

“Venezuela was so incredible,” Trump said. “We have Delcy, who’s been very good, we have the whole chain of command, and they’ve been — you know, look, the relationship’s been great.”

The only problem is that Israel has taken out everyone on the short list. 

“The people we had in mind are dead … and now we have another group,” Trump said. “They may be dead also, based on reports. So, I guess you’ll have a third wave coming in. Pretty soon, we’re not going to know anybody.” 

“I guess the worst case would be we do this, and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person, right? That could happen,” Trump said in another moment of candor. “You go through this and then in five years you realize you’ve put somebody in who was no better.”

“This is all a roll of the dice,” former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta said on CNN. “What I worry about as we go through four or five weeks of bombing, and at the end of that, the regime is still in place and nothing changes, then we have to ask ourselves, ‘why the hell did we do this?’”

IRAN STRIKES ERASE SPACE BETWEEN TRUMP AND NETANYAHU, INSIDERS SAY

While Congress debates whether Trump’s unauthorized war violated Article 1 of the Constitution, he’s received a vote of confidence from another important constituency, a slew of retired generals and admirals — some of the country’s most respected and level-headed military leaders, including five four-star commanders, and a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. 

“As retired senior American military leaders, we support the joint U.S.-Israeli military action to degrade and weaken the Iranian regime’s ability to threaten the United States, our allies and partners, and the Iranian people,” the 73 senior officers write in an open letter, citing the “hundreds of Americans have lost their lives at the hands of the Islamic Republic and its terrorist proxies.”

Jamie McIntyre (@jamiejmcintyre) is the Washington Examiner‘s senior writer on national security.